At the time of writing, I'm the most recent new member.
As you can see from my intro post, I joined mainly to pursue an interest in the old politico-economic game Great Britain Ltd. I tinkered with it when it first came out and would like to do so again, starting by printing out the original listing.

Several kind folk have already helped, particularly lurkio who provided this link to load the program,

That loads it up and scrolls through the program and the LIST command will scroll through it again.

Searching on previous posts, I think I need to *SPOOL it, but I don't appear to have an "*" key on my Mac.

I tried it on a Windows machine that allows a "*" but the *SPOOL command does nothing.

I tried the Windows emulator and can get the program to run but cannot get it to just load the source code.

LISTing the lines to 100 shows the attached. I still had hair when I last programmed a BBC Micro and I have forgotten most of what I knew, so I don't know whether there is anything stopping me SPOOLing.

danaielj noted, "Loading the game reveals a "CALL TOP" and little else... So a little disassembly is probably going to be required. TOP seems to be at &1935 on my emulated beeb and the first instruction is an LDX"

I'm afraid I'm entirely mystified by that.

So, to return to my quest, I just want to print out the BASIC source code for GBLTD and the above is to establish my credentials to ignorance and to demonstrate that I have tried.

1. In BeebEm click the Comms menu item and make sure the printer on/off is ticked.
2. Again in Comms choose printer destination Clipboard.
3. Assuming the program is already loaded type;
LIST [Ctrl-B] [Return]
When the listing has finished type [Ctrl-C]

You should now be able to paste the 'printed listing' into a text editor or word processor for printing.

Apple machines do not have an asterisk symbol?!! Surely this cannot be right. I know Apple stuff is 'quirky' but not to have an asterisk ...

If you wish to print a disassembly of machine code from BeebEm, make sure you have Exmon 2 loaded as a ROM image (use the Master machine) and use that. H switches the printer on and H switches it off after the disassembly. The Exmon 2 manual is available easily from the web.

flaxcottage wrote:Apple machines do not have an asterisk symbol?!! Surely this cannot be right. I know Apple stuff is 'quirky' but not to have an asterisk ...

It's shift+8, like every other computer. The Mac's keyboard mapping is an infinite improvement on the Windows mapping once you need to type most things: e.g. option+8 for a bullet point, option+ or shift+option + hyphen for en and em dash, option+e then any other compatible letter to type that letter with an acute, etc. Compare and contrast with memorisation Windows-specific alt codes. Ctrl+shift+u on X11 is at least an improvement, for using ordinary unicode numbers.

I would dare imagine though that the emulator he is using has simply performed a physical mapping rather than a logical one. On a BBC the asterisk is above the colon, so find whichever key produces a colon in the emulator and then press that with shift. It's probably the single-quote key since that's next to semicolon, where the colon key is on a BBC.

Thanks again danielj - that’s a result and will allow progress, but I’ll still try to manage it myself.
To Thomas and flax, yes it does have an asterisk on the keyboard but it does not produce anything when used in that application.

I've never used a Mac, but often beeb emulators have an option for "logical" or "physical" keyboard mapping; so shift+8 should give an asterisk in one, while shift+: should give one in the other, assuming that : is near the bottom right of the keyboard's main section.

Seems to work perfectly well on BBC BASIC for Windows, other than it annoyingly complains about lower case keypresses, so it most likely will run on ARM BASIC and any other BBC BASICs as well. I'll give it a try on the PDP11....

Looking at the Companies House records for Dealogic and Computasoft, it does seem likely that its the same guy. It's Simon W Hessel, as I recall from playing the game, and that's the same middle initial I see here.

I reckon he probably did write it himself though - as a teenager, in common with many other BBC games of the period.

Inriguingly, the listing for GBLTD contains his address at the time. Looking on Google Maps, it appears to be an unremarkable apartment block. It's nice to think that maybe this chap rose from a relatively poor background to be (most probably) a multimillionaire thanks in part to his skills with BBC BASIC!

Also in his defence I imagine that the meaningless variable names were probably due to needing to crunch the program up to save space.